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The Rice football defense lost a lot of leaders to graduation this offseason. Having a familiar face in Jon Kay take over as the coordinator helps, but there was still plenty of dust to knock off as the Owls went through spring practices over the last several weeks. With new staff and new players, the program had plenty to work on from a defensive perspective.
“I think there’s a fair amount of new,” Kay said, addressing those changes during the offseason. This spring practice review tackles some of that new, some of the old and takes a more holistic look at what this side of the ball looks like with spring practices complete.
Back in the Friday night role after several weeks in the bullpen, Davion Hickson delivered what was unquestionably his best performance of the season. Hickson went 7.2 innings, striking out a career-high 10 while limiting the Blazers to three hits.
UAB snuck the first run across in the opening inning with a single, a stolen base and a groundout. Hickson put things in cruise control after that, getting through the first two outs of the eighth before allowing two runners to reach and exiting the game. The last two runs charged to his ledger were allowed by Jack Ben-Shoshan in relief. The Rice bats did little to help the cause, tallying three hits, no runs and 13 strikeouts.
Rice baseball did not get its typically sharp start from JD McCracken in Game 2, a reality that proved fateful as the bats struggled to produce. UAB scored three in the first, two in the second and on in the third before McCracken was lifted in favor of Von Baker and eventually Mark Perkins. By the time the fourth inning came to a close, Rice was trailing 8-0.
The Owls most encouraging offensive inning of the weekend would soon follow. The Owls loaded the bases off Braxton Shelton with one out, then proceeded to rattle off five consecutive hits, scoring six runs before a double-play ended the inning. Back within two runs, Rice would manage just two base runners for the remainder of the game, dropping the series.
The Rice bats woke up for the series finale, scoring three times in the first off UAB starter Isaac Warrick, who would then be the victim of two Rice home runs in the second, putting the Blazers in a 6-0 hole after two frames. UAB gave Rice a scare with a five-run third, with Ben-Shoshan getting a strikeout to strand the would-be tying run in scoring position.
A three-run home run from Blaine Brown, his second long ball of the afternoon, gave Rice some breathing room before the Owls added another insurance run in the sixth and the seventh before UAB began a comeback of their own. UAB scored five straight to get back within one.
Rice pushed one run across in the ninth, turning the ball over to Jackson Blank in the bottom of the inning. Blank got two outs, but loaded the bases. Marco Fuentes entered and coaxed a fly out to right field to extinguish the threat and end the game.
It was mostly encouraging news regarding the Rice football offense as head coach Scott Abell and his staff started installation this spring. In his words, they got “probably 60 percent” of the way toward where they need to be while he’d been hoping for the group to get to 75 percent by the end of the spring.
“The meat and potatoes are in,” he teased, reinforcing the team had gotten the bones of the offense installed. With those pieces in place, it’s time to step back and make an assessment of how this side of the ball is doing and what we learned from it during the spring.